I've been thinking and thinking about how to best capture Matt's and my time in Kenya for the last few days and it's so hard!! There were so many beautiful and amazing things that we heard and saw that there don't seem to be enough or the precise words to really capture it perfectly. A better writer could, I'm sure. But, I have to try, so here goes.
We started our trip by flying into Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. It's a big city, but still developing. We got into the airport in the evening and stayed the first night in Nairobi. The next day we traveled by van out of Nairobi to Meru county, in eastern Kenya. We actually stayed in a smaller area called Maua which was situated in the beautiful mountains of central Kenya. I was surprised at the climate that we were in because I expected Africa in the summer to be blistering hot. But, we were in a mountainous area where it was cool and misty in the mornings and evenings, in the low 60s/high 50s. During the day it did warm up to maybe the low-mid 70s, certainly not the extreme temperatures that I was expecting.
These are tea plants. They grew all along the hills and looked beautiful.
For most of our time, we stayed in a nice hotel in Maua. The hotel was situated on the beautiful Mboone River and the landscaping was very lush and tropical looking. It had most of the comforts of home, though electricity and hot water came and went as they pleased it seemed. We had limited internet connection but, personally, I didn't care because I wanted to really soak up the moments that we were having right then. We ate our meals (just breakfast and dinner, we rarely ate lunch) here and the staff really accommodated us well. We had to be careful about the water and only use bottled water, but that became second-nature eventually.
Gregory the Gecko stayed in our room with us during the week.
During the days we traveled out to even more remote places to meet with ZOE working groups and once we turned off the main highway, oh boy, the roads got BUMPY!!! I've never been on a roller coaster that gave me so many jostles and jolts. It was quite an experience. Another thing that stood out to us was that everyone walked right next to or on the road, including children, cows, goats, chickens, and donkeys. There was one main paved road and any other side roads were just dirt and so everyone everyone traveled along the same paved road to get anywhere they needed to go, which made it a crowded and scary to whiz past. Like in many other foreign countries, the driving in Kenya is less about following the rules and more about just getting to where you're going. Accidents are few and far between, our drivers said, and it is more likely that you will get stuck in the mud off the side of the road than anything, especially during the rainy seasons.
We got plugged into this trip through Davidson UMC in North Carolina. They sponsor several groups in Kenya and had 6 people on the trip. Mom heard about the trip through her connections in the conference and with friends at Davidson, so she asked if we were interested and we said, "Why are you even asking!?? Of course we want to go!!!" So, we traveled with Davidson folks, along with others from various other places in North Carolina, Texas, and even Haiti. It was a wonderful group and we bonded very quickly. I don't think this would have been quite such an amazing trip without this particular group. The group had a looooot of fun and shared tons of laughs, it was an inquisitive and sensitive group of people who asked a lot of earnest and thoughtful questions. I'm sure the ZOE staff that were driving us and traveling with us are really glad we're gone so that they can have some peace and quiet, but we learned so much about Kenyan culture and society because we were always asking questions and discussing similarities and differences between our two homelands.
One highlight of our time together was the constant effort to learn words and phrases in Swahili. We had fun *trying* to communicate with Kenyans in their native tongue (and then laughing at ourselves for the mistakes that we made - water soup, anyone?). Here are some of the phrases we picked up and used as much as we could throughout the week:
+ Jambo: Hello
+ Yamaza: Be quiet!
+ Yamaza wewe: Be quiet yourself!
+ Twende: Let's go!
+ Haraka: Hurry!
+ Nakupenda: I love you.
+ Sasa?: What's up?
+ Poa poa/Poasana: Cool/Very good
+ Bwana Asifiwe: Praise the Lord
+ Ndio: Yes
+ Mzuri: Good
+ Asanti/Asantisana: Thank you/Thank you very much
+ Karibu: You're welcome
+ Muzungu: literally this means "someone who travels around aimlessly" but in reality it means "White people" accompanied by an eye roll (just kidding, but seriously)
+ Chizi: crazy
+ Twiga: my favorite Swahili word meaning giraffe!
+ Supu: beautiful (You have to put the emphasis on the last u because otherwise it's the word for soup...hence my comment above about about water soup. We passed by a pretty waterfall and we were trying to say "beautiful water" which is maji supU, we ended up saying maji supu - water soup. Not the same thing!)
I think our most common phrase throughout the week was, "Twende chizi muzungus!" "Let's go you crazy white people!"
One of the most surreal things was that everywhere we went, we were oddities. Since we were out in small villages and more remote places, a lot of the people we passed or met had never seen white people in person before. They would stop in their tracks and stare as we went past in our van, shouting, "Muzungus! Muzungus!" When we met some of the ZOE kids in the groups they would touch our skin and were enthralled by our hair. I was trying to think of a situation that would elicit the same response back in the United States. I think aliens would have to come to Earth to cause the same kind of reaction.
Next post: Jambo Muzungus! pt. 2 (more about the program and the kids we met)
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